Bernardo de La Paz
Bernardo de La Paz's JournalFCC extracted political concession for Paramount Skydance merger
Free link: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/07/24/fcc-greenlights-skydance-paramount-cbs-00476030
“I welcome Skydance’s commitment to make significant changes at the once storied CBS broadcast network,” Carr said. “In particular, Skydance has made written commitments to ensure that the new company’s programming embodies a diversity of viewpoints from across the political and ideological spectrum.”
“I cannot support this order approving this transaction in light of the payout and other troubling concessions Paramount made to settle a baseless lawsuit,” Gomez wrote in her dissent. “After months of cowardly capitulation to this Administration, Paramount finally got what it wanted. Unfortunately, it is the American public who will ultimately pay the price for its actions.”
Short term link (disappears in about 24 hours): https://www.morningstar.com/news/marketwatch/2025072562/fcc-shows-that-its-holdup-of-the-paramount-skydance-merger-was-political-all-along
Same article endures but requires subscription: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/fcc-shows-that-its-holdup-of-the-paramount-skydance-merger-was-political-all-along-effc9bc8
FCC shows that its holdup of the Paramount-Skydance merger was political all along
Last Friday, Paramount announced the cancellation of "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" as of next May, stating it was "purely a financial decision." But many media watchers questioned whether cancelling the No. 1 rated late-night show may also have been driven by politics. Colbert routinely skewers Trump on air and had called the settlement reached by Paramount a "big fat bribe," just days before.
Trump hailed the decision to end the show. "I absolutely love that Colbert got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings," Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social.
[...]
In its statement, the FCC said Skydance had also agreed to end all diversity programs at Paramount, which Carr deemed "invidious" and a form of discrimination.
mr prez, will you be deregulating the Epstein industry? Raising tariffs on imported Epstein?
Have you met the Epstein immigrant detention quotas?
Will you have Health Care ready for Congress in two Epsteins?
Have any Epstein manufacturing plants actually been onshored yet?
How is the Epstein peace progressing in Ukraine?
When do the Epstein tax cuts start putting money in people's pockets?
Do you want the Washington and Cleveland teams renamed the Epsteins?
Will the FBI be moving into the Epstein building next year?
Have you received plans for the Epstein project to fund cancer research?
Are you going to deport all the Epsteins?
Is the Epstein Force in the military fully equipped?
Will the Epstein wing of your presidential Library have any books in it?
When will you be launching your Epstein crypto currency?
How will you redistrict the Epstein vote?
With your big deregulation push, will you be deregulating the Epstein industry?
Will you replace FEMA with the Epstein agency for flood relief?
Are you launching the Epstein network to replace PBS?
How are those Epstein trade deals going? There will be so many it will be Epstein!
Yes on gloves, yes on teeth, but "take no prisoners" does not work in the long run
Take no prisoners is a prominent characteristic of tRump's negotiating style, which is why they have 1 1/2 deals in 90 days. Take no prisoners is why Mike Johnson's caucus is so fractious and unmanageable. Take no prisoners is why, despite all the lies and bots and flimflammery and racism and misogyny, tRump won by a razor thin popular vote and a razor thin House.
Obama did not win by taking no prisoners. Obama is a much more effective negotiator than tRump. Obama won by "Yes We Can" and building a ground game with a positive forward-looking movement behind it. ACA was one result.
Yes to thinking outside the box and being a bit unconventional.
No, it is the real deal, but it *IS* being oversold and a bubble has formed.
Another AI winter is coming, but it will be briefer and less pronounced than previous ones where funding almost completely dried up.
AI works, just not nearly as well as those promoting it would have us believe. It is not going away, and it will get better and more powerful, not immediately. Consumer robots in 2029 might happen but there won't be much uptake. AI penetration into call centres and "agents" will continue, but mostly just as the first filtering stages until some time later. Companies will pull back some from agentic AI but not abandon it. AI will be used to gather information and suggest options and assist with data intensive work like programming and legal briefs, but everybody involved in that will pull back some due to "hallucinations" and the strict requirements for testing and fact checking. Courts have no patience for fake citations in legal briefs.
But by 2050, I think self-driving and free standing self-directing robotics will be plentiful and useful.
I think Heinlein is the most American of all SF writers and the best story teller too. Others are more lyrical
Some writers are even more firmly in the science / tech end of things. Some excel at philosophy. Others are more adept at character development.
None of them combined those elements as well as Heinlein, and he did it in an American way. He expressed great love for freedom and free-thinking, for the entrepreneurial force strong in Americans and for the grittiness of American culture. I get the impression that he would have been a great hitch--hiker to pick up heading out of California through the dry parts of Nevada and Utah. Equally, he would have been a great guy to have working beside you at a desk in an engineering firm or managing an animation studio. There is a wonderful photo of him with Asimov and L Sprague de Camp while doing engineering for the US WW2 war effort. I get a feeling he would be tough and a bit abrasive but I see him in my mind as having a smile and joy about him more than any other feeling or sensibility.
Perhaps Heinlein's most redeeming quality is that as with Mark Twain (who greatly influenced him as a writer) he loved cats.
Musk has a childish (in good and bad senses) fascination with the Red Planet
Red Planet is the name of one of Heinlein's best books. A gripping yarn littered with bits of science and political philosophy through and through. Thoroughly grounded in the best scientific understanding of Mars at the time, he got it right about how the atmosphere was very thin and the climate very cold. True to his strength as a writer, he was very imaginative in weaving that in with well considered aliens and delving into their alien-ness while conveying a sense that humans would still be able to connect.It was written as the third of his young adult novels 1947-1958 (one a year), and I read it as 5th or 6th grader. I re-read it for the first time in decades a couple of years ago, and I couldn't put it down.
Muck uses a retro 40s/50s imagining of a "pressure suit" and helmet as his avatar sometimes, such as might have been used on Heinlein's 1949 Mars, and consistent with the kind of illustrations in the hardcover. I have no info, but I don't doubt for an instant that he has read Red Planet in his youth. I thought that before the name Grok came up for his AI chat bot.
Thanks for the link. The writer is pretty balanced but is harsh on Heinlein's flaws, as he should be.
In recent years it has become a sport to deride Heinlein as some kind of weird extreme loathsome creature we have to deal with. Jeet Heer does a good job of admiringly highlighting at various points aspects of Heinlein's towering imagination, his intellect, his wide-ranging mind. But he also minces no words when needed to point out negatives. For example, he says Farmham's Freehold is an anti-racist novel (very true) that only a Klansman could love (also true, one of my least favourite books of his).
Heinlein is always thought-provoking and well worth the time because he also is a master story teller. It's worth starting with The Moon is a Harsh Mistress or the Future History collection or Time Enough for Love or Red Planet.
The charade is wearing thin and people are noticing
This OP is prompted by The Gnome's latest bombast: https://www.democraticunderground.com/100220479935 senseandsensibility wrote:
"They aren't just liberals anymore. If you look at the Democrat Party, they're a party of communists and Marxists and socialists."
Their rhetoric is getting more extreme by the hour. It's a sign of some desperation and it WON'T help them.
It won't help them because ordinary citizens, who might be low info and inclined to simply trust "the government", ... ordinary citizens will be exposed to the extremity of it more and more. As time goes on, they will increasingly get the impression that the people running the government are over the top, getting bizarre, not making sense, lying.
The regime is a bit desperate because they know they are dropping in the polls, so they want to keep their base and they think that the more extreme they paint the opposition (i.e. us), the more the citizens will rally to their side thinking the US is under attack from ... us. But it will backfire.
Little things like FEMA weak late response begin to be noticed and remembered more.
The charade is wearing thin and becoming more obvious to the people whose adherence is wavering, the people they most desperately are trying to keep away from ... us.
It is an in-group cutey nickname. Very few people outside of DU know the Krasnov connection.
Also, I think the Putin puppet theory is oversold and overbought on DU. tRump does what he does for narcissistic personal gain. He really doesn't care about anyone else. It is the simplest and most powerful explanation for his actions. We read all the time on right wing sites that "Democrats are actively working to destroy America because they hate it." Flipping it and saying it on DU is just as nonsensical. tRump probably had Russian help in 2016, and he reveres Putin for his authoritarian power and wealth, so for example he was very toady and puppy-doggy at the famous Helsinki summit.
Never forget two key points: 1) Rs and Ds have the same values: freedom, justice, family, country, and religion or rejection of. Ds add broader communities because they have more empathy. 2) They both act semi-rationally and semi-emotionally but have been trained to view things through very different lenses. Personally I think Ds are less trained, more diverse in view point, and clearer in vision.
tRump does not want to destroy the US. He just doesn't care what gets broken and damaged and who gets injured or killed, especially if they are not rich white people, especially males. He doesn't wake up saying "How can I destroy the US?" He wakes up saying "What can I do for myself today?" He thinks he is saving the US and the world from wokism and communism (and that he deserves to be ten times richer and twice as powerful). Hence his aspirations for the Nobel Peace Prize. But he is primarily very self-centered and not hardly at all introspective and has little or no empathy for others. He is famously transactional.
Understand the vast gulf between "gone" and "gone"
There is "gone", as in gone away, gone for some time, gone not sure where, gone but bound to come back sooner or later.
And there is "gone" as in irretrievably, gone never to return, there was a massive brouhaha and words were said and there is no hope.
The United States of America, as in the ideal, the aspirations, and imperfect embodiment almost all citizens love, joined by many people around the world, is gone in some sense to some degree, but is not irretrievable. Don't give up.
To say it is gone never to return is to give up, to not help, to be destructive in the certainty of the negativity. There is a vast gulf between "gone, let's get it back" and "gone no hope".
The defeatists who say it is gone never to return should be clear about that. People who say it is "gone" should be queried to be clear which gone they mean.
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